In August 2013, the same Googler followed up on that promise by saying that, to avoid raising suspicion with Google, marketers should consider using nofollow links in the infographics they distribute across a large number of sites. This should be done to signify that your infographics aren’t being shared just to up your Google rankings, but rather they are being shared for educational, promotional, or lead and traffic generation purposes.

Google has just updated its official guidelines for "Link Schemes" extending further the perimeter outside of which content with links incoming to and outgoing from your site will be considered outright spam worth of filtering or penalization.

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."

He writes: "If you repeat the use of a word in your press release, Google will think you are trying to stuff it with keywords and try to trick its index. Repeated words are a big red flag."

On the Google official page these other situations are listed as not OK:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking

Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank

Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. For example:There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.

Low-quality directory or bookmark site links.

Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites, for example:Visitors to this page: 1,472 - car insurance

Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites

Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature, for example:

Mycomment: You shouldn't have any more doubts now. You must link out only to provide extra info on a specific topic, that your readers would benefit from and you don't exchange, barter or buy unnatural links from anyone if you want to avoid Google penalties. safe solution is to apply by default a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag for all your outgoing links and to switch it off where inappropriate.

Solve today's algorithmic challenges, and future-proof against Panda-monium! Here's a 10-day guide of Panda checks, tips and warnings that will assist in identifying and mitigating the risks (and stress) associated with Google Panda updates.

Although a new release has since Panda (update) been issued, Penguin, this is a great "to-do" list for yourself or to just learn a little about SEO. Your SEO team should be long on top of this. If that is news to them, then you have a competence issue in your team.

This review was written by Thorsten Strauss for his curated content

"3 World Marketing Mix", a triangulated review of marketing from point of view of executive, consultant and lecturer, on Scoop.it http://sco.lt/8fpYjR

Claire Broadley, has a useful list of the top 50 Google penalization triggers which may cause a penalization for your web site.

These are the most common reasons for Google to penalize your site and while the definite reasons for a penalty may not be all clear, the factors listed in this article definitely contribute to put you in the high-risk group.

With the Delegator® AlgoSleuth Tool you can plot your website's organic traffic against Google's major Algorithm updates and see what was won or lost.

Robin Good's insight:

Easily find out if your web site or blog has been affected by one of Google algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin. Next to the excellent Panguin Tool, now you have an additional tool to make sure you have not been hit.

From the official site: "AlgoSleuth harnesses the power of the Google Analytics API to provide a powerful analysis of your site’s organic traffic and highlights all major Google Algorithm updates that may have affected you over the past several years.

The tool includes all major Panda and Penguin updates from January 2011 to today.

The process for extracting your data takes, on average, just 2-3 minutes. After that, you can use AlgoSleuth to query results for one or any number of Google Analytics profiles."

He writes: "AlgoSleuth uses the Google analytics API to fetch traffic details from your account, and matches with known Panda & Penguin updates to verify whether you have been hit by a Google algo update."

Here's an excellent visual poster illustrating the key differences between the type of SEO activities that were effectve back in the days before Google Panda and Google Penguin made their first appearances, and the ones that are appropriate and effective today.

Things have changed a lot in these last two years, and this visual diagram does a great job of reviewing and synthesizing what has really changed.

Whether you are new to web publishing or have a long established web presence, I think you will find lots of valuable information in here as well as many confirmations of things you thought but weren't sure of when it comes to SEO.

Has your organic website traffic been affected by Google's algorithm updates? Use the Panguin tool to merge Google's updates with your traffic data to find out.

Robin Good's insight:

If you wonder whether your site has ever been penalized by the Google Panda or Penguin updates, you don't need to guess anymore. You can check and be sure of whether any of the Google updates has ever affected your web site by simply using this free tool.

Panguin, this is how it is called, is a web-based tool that allows you map the dates of each major Google algorithm update, including each Panda and Penguin update over your traffic graph inside Google Analytics.

I was a little worried about firing this tool at our stack so I aimed it at my blog and what a relevation. The simple stuff is always the most helpful and this is BEYOND helpful in explaining if your website has gained or lost thanks to Google's Zoo (Panda and Penguin algorithm updates).

MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) - Google Inc has overhauled its search algorithm, the foundation of the Internet's dominant search engine, to better cope with the longer, more complex queries it has been...

Robin Good's insight:

Google has announced this week that its web search engine is now being driven by a new algorithm, officially known as Hummingbird.

The transition to the new algo took place sometime during August, and it affects approximately 90 percent of worldwide searches.

The Hummingbird algorithm focuses on understanding the meaning of more complex inquiries, according to comments from Google's senior VP of search, Amit Singhal.

If you want to learn more about the risks that "unnatural" links can cause to your site, here's an good resource to check out: a curated selection of ten clips focusing only on this topic: links and Google penalties.

One of the best ways to not leave any backlinks footprints is to build backlinks from many sources. Cheap Backlink Building Service bring you 3 highly diversified link packages and build from a variety of sources. All of Your backlinks will come from high pr and quality such as Web 2.0, Social Bookmarks and Wikis. http://bit.ly/12vdoOU

The Google Penalty Checker is a free web-based tool which allows you to instantly verify whether your web site has been penalized by one of the Google Panda or Google Penguin algorithm updates in the last two years.

The key characterizing feature of this service is that it provides a statistically significant result that highlights exactly which update impacted your website and if it was a positive or negative impact.

While a lot of the specifics of the Google Penguin 2.0 update are still shaking out, a great deal of information has already emerged. Here's a look at what we know, how Penguin 2.0 is affecting sites, and what to do if your site has been impacted.

Robin Good's insight:

If you are new to the Google Penguin algorithm and want to get the full story on it as well as specific, practical advice on how to counter it, Jayson DeMers on SearchEngineWatch has a good review that includes everything you need to know.

On the morning of June 26th, MozCast registered a record high temperature of 113 degrees. This is an initial investigation into the possible algorithm update, and a potential partial-match domain (PMD) connection.

Robin Good's insight:

Google has updated its algorithms again yesterday, and by looking at the amount of changes in the SERPs this does not look like something minor.

According to the research and analysis done by Dr Pete on the MOZ blog, the web sites that have been most affected are those that utilize in their domain name some of the keywords for which they are being searched for.

These are called PDM (partial domain matches) and data shows that these have all been strongly affected.

So, if you own a web site that utilizes some of your niche keywords in its name and have seen a sudden drop in traffic or earnings since yesterday, check out the thorough analysis that Dr. Pete has done and see for yourself what is really happening.

From the article intro: "If you follow our MozCast Google "weather" tracker, you may have noticed something unusual this morning – a record algorithm flux temperature of 113.3°F (the previous high was 102.2°, set on December 13, 2012). While the weather has been a bit stormy off and on since Penguin 2.0 and the announcement of 10-day rolling Panda updates, this one was still off the charts: "

How do you get links in a post-penguin world? For far too many the answer seems to be, exclusively, guest posting. Today I’m going to give you four reasons why I think this tactic can be as dangerous as those it replaced.

Robin Good's insight:

Google is getting smarter every day, and it makes little to no sense at all to keep going after links like it was 2005.

In this very interesting article by James Finlayson on SEOMoz, you can get a good idea of how Google thinks and looks at your inbound linking profile when looking at your site.

Better understanding link quality, type, position and authorship can help you a great deal in saving yourself not only lots of time and money, but also the risk of having a site that is penalized.

The best strategy of all in my opinion is to build oustanding, uniquely useful content, ike no one else in your niche does.

Are you confused about the difference between Penguin and an Unnatural Links penalty? Not sure whether you should be disavowing your links? Wondering whether you should file for reconsideration? Well...you're not alone!

Robin Good's insight:

Excellent review of Google Panda, Penguin and "unnatural links" manual penalties from Google from Marie Haynes, including symptoms, consequences and best approaches to recover from each one.

The article also cover the use of the Disavow Links tool, when and whether to file an official Google Reconsideration Request and what is the best course of action for most troublesome penalty-related situations your site may have fallen into.

Can using Google’s link disavow tool help remove penalties? Yes, the company says. But when it comes to manual penalties, disavowing links alone isn’t enough. With algorithmic penalties, there may be a time delay involved.

Robin Good's insight:

If you have been hit by a Google penalty, whether "manual" or "algorithmic" here is some useful information for you.

Danny Sullivan reports on how the link disavow tool works and what you should expect from it, in terms of how much time it takes for the tool to process your submission as well as how much time you should wait to see some benefit to your site.

On August 15, 2012, our agency's website (which was in the middle of a complete redesign) was hit with a manual penalty by our friends over at Google.

Robin Good's insight:

Here is a detailed report by founder Lewis Sellers, of how his web agency in the UK, Pinpoint Designs, got hit by a Google penalty without having consciously done anything tricky, and how it gradually found a way to get this penalization revoked.

Key takeaways:

Start by building up a list of all the links pointing to your website - This is extremely easy. Login to Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools and use other websites such as Ahrefs or Majestic SEO. ...

Work to remove those links hard - Removing links isn't easy, there are numerous sites out there that will help remove links from you, but it's a fairly slow process. ...

If you can't remove links - If you can't remove links, use the Google Disavow tool. That being said, don't use it unless absolutely necessary. ...

Write good quality content - Show Google that you can write good content. Make sure that all the content on your website is unique, up to date and interesting...

Spend time on your reconsideration request - Google must receive hundreds, if not thousands, of reconsideration requests each and every week. Rather than sending in a paragraph, spend some time telling them what you've done wrong and most importantly, be honest. Tell them why you think you've been targeted, what you've done to rectify it and how it won't happen again.

But there is a lot more useful stuff in the article, including all the steps taken, tools used and what to do if Google says no to your Reconsideration Request.

This is the first in a series of articles looking at the aftermath of Google’s Panda algorithm update, which launched February 24, 2011.

Robin Good's insight:

Two years ago today Google Panda hit thousands of web sites bringing them to near oblivion in a matter of hours. After two years most of the sites that were originally hit by this Google penalty are still suffering from it, and there are only a small number of cases where the site has been able to recover fully its pre-Panda traffic levels.

It was originally called the “farmer” update because Google’s prime target was “content farms,” a name used to describe sites that created high-quantities of low-quality content that sometimes ranked highly in Google’s search results.

...

As you’ll see below, on a list of nearly two dozen of Panda’s original losers, only two websites have returned to the SEO visibility that they had about three weeks post-Panda. The others have all continued to lose search visibility.

Some other Panda-hit websites have recovered, though not all of those recoveries have been permanent. We’ll look at all that later in this article."

If you have been hit by a Google penalty, this may have been triggered by the number and type of links that are pointing to your site. Given the new quality standards Google is after, it may be a good idea to clean up any inbound link that is at risk of compromising our site trust.

From the original article by Jesse Woodhouse: "If your website has been impacted by “garbage” links, you may need to take a street sweeper to your backlink portfolio.

Seeing a drop in traffic or rankings can be concerning, especially when it happens suddenly.

If you have noticed this, chances are your were affected by a Google algorithm update or penalty.

If so, then you may need to consider pruning your backlinks by finding low quality or harmful links pointing to your website and then remove them. Doing so can help you put your website back on a road to recovery."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.